AI: Fixing the Woo

Yesterday I inadvertently posted a video clip which wonderfully explained the double slit experiment right up until it implied that we humans, as observers, had the power to change the universe to our will. Sure enough, it was an excerpt from a Deepak Chopresque series of videos by well known fuzzy-thinker Fred Alan Wolf. I countered my own blunder by finding another video describing the same phenomenon without the woo. Just my luck, a video production company called the Cassiopeia Project had seen the offending clip and remade it with proper science and a primer on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Theorem.

Probably how it first went down...

So we all remember Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort’s Origin of the Species re-release right? What if skeptics were to turn the tables and re-release Chopra’s books with actual science about quantum physics? Or maybe a historically accurate bible? Thoughts?

The ART Inquisition (or AI) is a question posed to you, the Mad Art Lab community. Look for it to appear Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 3pm ET.

Did you hear about that thing a few years ago where a bunch of biblical scholars voted to decide how likely it was that each line in the bible was true? They color coded it, so there’s this whole book of biblical verses that are printed in varying degrees ranging from red (true) to black (bullshit). It’s awesome.

I’d love to see someone try to violate Chopra’s copyright and force him into court to defend it. If he’s talking about a universal truth then anyone should be able to write about it right? This happened with the Amityville horror franchise where the original copyright holders went to court because others were making money off their ideas. IIRC the judge ended up saying that it appeared to him that the whole thing was a work of fiction. Unfortunately, if it doesn’t work we’ll just have another book o’ woo out there, so maybe not the best idea.